The drugmaker AstraZeneca has paused a planned £200m investment in its Cambridge research site, completing a depressing week for the UK pharmaceutical industry.
The decision by Britain’s biggest company means none of its much-trumpeted £650m investment package in the UK – which was originally announced in March 2024 – is currently proceeding.
The now stalled £200m Cambridge project had been set to create 1,000 jobs. In January, AstraZeneca scrapped plans to invest £450m in its vaccine manufacturing plant in Merseyside, citing a cut in British government support.
An AstraZeneca spokesperson said: “We constantly reassess the investment needs of our company and can confirm our expansion in Cambridge is paused. We have no further comment to make.”
The latest UK setback contrasts with AstraZeneca’s moves in other jurisdictions. In July the company announced it would invest $50bn (£37bn) in the US by 2030, as part of a string of pledges by pharmaceutical companies as Donald Trump’s threats to impose sector-specific tariffs loom over the industry.
The British drugmaker, which is headquartered in Cambridge, said its US investment would fund a new drug manufacturing facility in Virginia and expand its research and development and cell therapy manufacturing in Maryland, Massachusetts, California, Indiana and Texas.
The news from AstraZeneca caps a week of negative announcements and warnings from what is a crucial UK industry.
Keir Starmer’s government has described life sciences as “one of the crown jewels of the UK economy”, while the previous Conservative government had vowed to turn the country into a “global science and technology superpower” by 2030.
Yet on Wednesday, US drugmaker Merck scrapped a £1bn London research centre as well as laying off 125 scientists in the capital this year.
Its planned new lab, called the UK Discovery Centre, at the Belgrove House site opposite St Pancras and King’s Cross stations, was already under construction and scheduled to open in two years’ time. It had been expected to eventually employ about 800 people overall, including 180 scientists.
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Meanwhile, Sir John Bell, a prominent scientist and former regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, warned on Thursday that other big pharmaceutical companies were going to stop investing in the UK.
He told BBC Radio 4 he had spoken to several chief executives of large pharmaceutical companies in the past six months “and they’re all in the same space, and that is, they’re not going to do any more investing in the UK”.
Then on Friday Paul Naish, the UK head of market access for the French pharmaceuticals company Sanofi, told the Guardian Britain called for a “proper plan from the Treasury” for life sciences, arguing the country had become “not a good place” to develop or sell drugs.